This is a simple one. It’s Windsor Castle in 1841 and we have a discussion between the Queen of England and some guy named Lord Melbourne (Though I always heard “Lord Melvin” in my youth) about letting Canada have a “responsible government”. I’d be a lot more interested in this if the term “responsible government” meant that we’d finally be getting a government that knew better than to do things like leaving the door so the cat can get out or spending all our money on toy skeletons, instead of the political meaning it actually has, which is something about us being allowed to elect folk from Canada to govern. Sounds like too much work to me. Interestingly, this piece has a discussion about Canada, but it is not set in Canada and features no Canadians. Why should Canada pretend that anything that happens elsewhere is important? Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of nationalism?
I must say that this one is a goldmine for great quotes that I would never find a useful in daily life. Many of the best Heritage Moment quotes are just unspecific enough that you can apply them elsewhere. These ones are all pretty directly about the debate at hand. That’s a shame. While the Queen has a lot of good buts, pretty much everything Lord Melbourne says is golden. My favorite is the bit about “some obscure politician from Montreal… or Toronto.” You tell them Melbourne. Also, your facial hair is godly.
I feel I can only justify Three and a Half Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake. This isn’t a bad one, but it is just lacking enough to be awesome.
Anyway, I assume the handmaiden who said “Pity Ma’am” was later murdered for pitying the Queen. Queenie don’t need your pity, handmaiden.
This is one of my favorites, I’ll just get this out of the way at the start. It is 980 AD and we have a highly stylized attack on a highly stylized viking village in Newfoundland. Our native attacker, apparently there is only one, is in a first-person stabbing game it seems. He walks into a ghostly viking’s home and murders this one guy. The guy’s ghostly viking neighbors come running and find their dead friend (the native apparently having fled, I guess). Then we’ve got a viking funeral (is that taps? I think the vikings are playing taps) and the vikings leave. Their village falls prey to a time lapse and then, in the 1960s and some scientists find out that there was once a village there.
Our Norwegian scientists are Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad (as a child I heard this as “Helga and Onastina Ingsta”, but I should have known the lady would never get top billing) and their scientific work (which consisted entirely of sticking one trowel into some dirt = Fact) shows that the vikings made it to Newfoundland way before other whiteys made it to North America. Good to know.
“Do you know what I think this is?” probably shouldn’t be one of my favorite Heritage Moment quotes, but it is. Maybe it’s just because it is the only non-narrator line of dialogue in the whole piece, but I also like the universal nature of this quote. I don’t have to wait for someone to ask if someone can fly so I can reply “Fly no…” and nobody has to wait until I say my name to say “Patrick, Patrick O’Neil” with this quote. You can ask anyone if they know what you think a thing is whenever you want. Try it today.
I’m giving this highly stylized Heritage Moment Five out of Six Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake. It’s a little light in the educational department, but it is an interesting watch.
It’s a little suspicious that we never see the native attacker. I entertain an idea about this: Our viking victim was, in fact, murdered by his wife! See how quickly he reacts to someone barging into his home? He’s not surprised. He doesn’t hesitate. Is that how you’d react if you were… smithing or whatever, and suddenly someone barged in to do a murder at you? I think not. But suppose you’d been arguing with the viking missus and she stormed out, grabbed the native weapon she happened to have found the day before, and stormed back in intent on releasing her womanly fury. When the others arrive they find the murderer pretending to mourn, accusing some native attack and sticking to her story so strongly that even the establishing captions thought it was a native attack. Well, fictional dead lady, you almost got away with it, but you didn’t reckon on the excellent deductive reasoning of PDR. Case closed.
The other option is that between the viking colonists and the Norwegian scientists the only proper Canadian in this minute is a murderer.
Today’s Heritage Moment is about sporting. If you live in a nation, there is literally nothing more important than being able to beat other nations in sport. This is more important than anything. Anything at all.
Specifically we’re looking at Canada, just a few days old, challenging English and French teams in canoeing (or some kinda boat race anyway). These plucky up-and-comers are the underdogs and they win anyway. Who woulda thinked it? Maybe this Canada thing will turn out alright after all.
We are told that nobody respects the team, dressed as they are “in their absurd red caps and brown suspenders.” I don’t know what is worse, the old timey time people who thought red caps and brown suspenders in some way affect ones ability to do boating, or the narrator who uses the word “absurd” as if he agrees with them. But what really gets me is how much money the team’s hometown wagered on this. Do they just have that kind of money lying around? In that whole young town is there nothing that they might be better off spending money on? NO! This is more important than anything. Anything at all.
Anyway, I don’t have much else to say. It’s got decent music and I like the pacing. In spite of his hatred of caps and suspenders, the narrator does a good job. There’s not a lot of quotability here, sadly (though, if some band ever takes the name “The Legendary Parisians” I’d totally support them). I feel like I have to call this one above average. Let’s go with Three and a Half Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake.
Today I’m doing something different. Today I am reviewing a Heritage Moment that I don’t remember from my youth. I have to assume that this thing was created after I stopped being indoctrinated by television. How will it hold up without the nostalgia factor?
Okay, so we’re over in World War Two. We get all kinds of fast exposition showing that the Canadian Boys are in trouble. They’re surrounded, they don’t have the equipment they need, and they’re also in a war. Basically, it isn’t a fun time. This one guy who is in charge leaves and tells John Osborn he’s in charge. Osborn issues a few orders, then a grenade is thrown into the building. Osborn sacrifices himself by jumping on the grenade to protect the others. That was nice of him.
So, how does it hold up? Without having seen it repeatedly in my formative years, I don’t see anything greatly quotable in here. Would I be saying “They never sent us any bloody jeeps, nevermind artillery” every time I hear artillery mentioned? It’s a possibility, but I can’t be sure. Maybe I’d yell “Grenade! Grenaaaaaaaaaaaaaade!” now and then, but all in all I can’t give this one much of a recommendation based on quotability.
But what about the rest of the piece? We’ve got Osborn’s sacrifice. That’s pretty noble. The sort of thing you want in these. And there’s the fact I learned that “our troops in Hong Kong were the first Canadians to see combat in the Second World War” so it has a little educational value. But the slow motion, man. Like twenty seconds of this minute-long spot are slowmo. That slow motion ruins it for me. I think I could have bought a moment of it, if it cut out after the explosion, but instead it goes on and on to show us the rain of Os-bits in front of his confused men who are still waiting for that order to go. Had it been just that little bit shorter, I still would have found it cheesy and stupid, but a burst of cheesy and stupid is great. 33% of the Moment being that way, is less great.
Up against my reviewing this thing holds up better than Lawson and Hennessy, but I can’t give this thing more than Three out of Six Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake. I can never say for certain objectively, but I suspect that even if I had grown up with it, this one would be in the middle-ground at best.
Okay, today we’ve got the construction of a railroad across Canada. They need to blow up some stuff with nitro, a highly volatile explosive, and nobody white wants that kind of risk. WHAT IS A CANADA TO DO? Wait, I know! Chinese! An immigrant worker steps up to take the risk for some danger pay and, even when the nitro blows up on him and the insensitive guy with the awesome beard says “Well, get another one”, the Chinese worker stumbles back out to happily try again! The piece ends with the man telling the story to his (I assume) grandchildren, mentioning the sheer volume of Chinese workers who died making the railroad, because they were less than he.
It’s like, sure, a lot of Chinese workers died to make the railroad, but hey, our friend here, who we’ve come to know and like, is fine, so it is all good! It turns out that this guy is like Bruce Willis in Unbreakable and he used his super durability to make the money needed to pay boat, got his wife to Canada, and started making progeny so he could tell his story. The tragic numbers of people who died doesn’t seem so bad when we look back with a survivor. In a way, this is a true fact of history. All tragedy is less terrible as time goes on, a lesson Canada needed to know. That is what we’re supposed to take from this one, right?
Anyway, to the review. Let us see now. This spot has a message of respect for a minority group and it includes an explosion and one of Canada’s apparent first superhuman citizens. All told I think I can give this one Four and a Half Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake. Is it racist that I really like the style protagonist’s hairstyle in the his youth? I’ll get out here just in case.
